In a way, we often treat our websites like our children. No matter how awful they might be, we rationalize their behavior and tell everyone else how wonderful they are. Those blinders can stop marketing efforts before they even begin. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how to remove the blindfold and make objective decisions to move our businesses forward.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Online Tools Mentioned This Week

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to chat about ugly websites.

Now what if it's the case that you're investing a ton of energy and effort into your marketing efforts and it's your ugly website that's holding you back from the kinds of levels of engagement and progress that you could be making? I know how this goes.

What happens is a lot of times marketers are brought in after a website or web property has already been developed and built. Much like parents, it's often the case that a CEO or a CMO or VP of marketing or a business owner, small business owners in particular, they look at their website and they go, "Oh, it's so beautiful. It's amazing. It's just what I wanted. It's perfect." They can rationalize that even while looking at just a junky, horrifying piece of crap.

This happens all the time. Human beings rationalize our decisions. We rationalize the investments that we've made. So when we see terrible crap, we think it's a pile of gold.

This is frustrating, and it's particularly frustrating for marketers who then have to take this pig and smear lipstick all over it and try and sell it as a side of beef or something that is actually going to convert visitors. That's insanely hard to do.

I've got this handy chart here, which will help to visually illustrate exactly how dramatic this math problem is. Now it's the case, in my opinion, that baby and website attractiveness probably fall along a similar scale. All parents think that their children are five stars, just like all website owners think that their websites are five stars.

Yet, if you were to ask them what percent of babies are absolutely stunningly beautiful, what percent of websites are absolutely stunningly beautiful, parents would be like, "Well, maybe 5% or 10%."

Well then, somebody's math is off. What's probably going on here is a lot of people who are in this group think they are in this group, and that's very frustrating.

What's not easy to do is go directly to a CMO, a CEO, your manager, your new team at a company you joined or at a company you're consulting with, or with a small business owner who you're working with and say, "Well, this is just a terrible website, and we're going to have to rebuild it if you want me to make the improvements that I need to make."

That does not fly. It just doesn't work. It's not reasonable. What is reasonable is to use data to help support your arguments. This is a process that I used to follow a little bit when I was a consultant, that I've seen other consultants and, in fact, other marketers who joined teams use. I've seen professional design teams do this as well.

Essentially, they'll put together a list of top competitors and then ask a brief survey. It doesn't have to be many people. You can get a few dozen folks who fall into three different groups.

You want to ask current customers, potential new customers, and, if you can, a few industry influencers or bloggers, journalists, the kinds of people that you might be seeking press attention, brand mentions, links awareness, those kinds of things from. Especially if you're doing any type of content production or content marketing, blogging, you want to see if the people who would be your content customers are enjoying and appreciating your website versus your competitors. Then just ask them to rate you versus your competition one through five. Make sure you're marking who these are.

A lot of times what happens is that your current customer group will say, "Yeah, we like the website just fine. Your website is great." This is whom your CEOs, your VPs of marketing, the small business owner, that's who they're interacting with. So their experience is, "I talk to customers, our customers all the time. They like the website." Maybe they do.

But if the potential new customers and the industry influencers are saying otherwise, are rating you much lower than your competition, well now you've identified a dramatic gap in why you can't accomplish the kinds of marketing that you might want to do. Marketing from earning social media signals, to earning shares, to getting links, to getting customers and conversions, all that stuff can be impacted that this.

If you are rated in that lower half, look at the top of the funnel metrics. By top of the tunnel metrics, I'm really talking about things like bounce rate, time on site, and browse rate, browse rate being the number of pages on average that are visited per visitor session. If these numbers, based on your past experience or, if you can get them, industry averages -- industry averages can be super helpful here. For many industries there are a lot of people who aggregate and publish these kinds of things on the web -- if they feel like major areas of opportunity, then a new design is looking like it's something that should go onto your list.

You should also be asking yourself from a context of the business as a growing company, as an effort that you want to put your resources into, "Does this feel more important than any other change?"

Is it the case that if we were able to change the trajectory of social sharing, content engagement, new links and citations, all these top of site metrics, bounce rates, time on site, browse rate, would those things be things that would really move the needle for the business? Sometimes the answer is actually no.

In a lot of the cases with consulting and services businesses, it's the case that other investments in other areas of the business would be better uses of time and energy, even if you are not in these high groups. For those of you who are doing commerce on the web of any kind, software as a service, or a subscription business, or an ecommerce business, a lot of local businesses where their early customers engage with them first on the web, this is probably going to be key.

Number three, if formal usability testing is too expensive, and for most small and medium sizes business it really is, try these three apps: Silverbackapp.com, FeedbackArmy.com, and UserTesting.com. I've heard a mix of opinions about all three of them in terms of which of them is a favorite. But all of them are potentially good in getting lots of new people to your site and collecting feedback about the problems and potential solutions you've got there. That can help lead you to a great design.

I didn't put it in here, but if you don't already have a design team or designer in mind, one of my personal favorite things to do, and this is sort of a little Rand hack here, I like going to Dribbble.com. If you are not already familiar somehow, that's Dribbble.com.

I like looking on Dribbble for the designers who have very well-rated stuff; very beautiful stuff, stuff that fits your aesthetic preferences, but do not yet have a large portfolio. That usually means that their prices will be lower since while they're still building up their portfolio of work.

Those designers who have tremendously well-rated projects and who have a large portfolio are going to be fairly expensive or at least on the very pricey scale. But you can find a lot of independent folks using that methodology on Dribbble if you're looking for a new designer.

Then when you get a new design in hand, make sure that you're trying that test. Design is one of those things that is extremely hard to A/B test. My best recommendation is to think of a few pages, one or a few pages of your site. Maybe it's a new piece of content that you're launching separately that you might almost think about the design as looking like it's on a new micro-site, although it's actually on your own domain, or potentially using a few of your landing pages as sort of feeling like landing pages on a micro-site that are still existing on your domain, and testing the old UI/UX versus the new one.

What you don't want to do is have a page that is embedded into the site's navigation overall, that lots of people are going to be navigating to and from the old one and new one, because then you'll get that disjointed experience.

If you can test this with something where external traffic is hitting it primarily -- a PPC landing page is a great place to go with this -- that can help show you what the new visual UI can do and what the observable lifts are in terms of these metrics and in terms of conversion rate.

This data driven approach can be very, very helpful in terms of convincing a manager or management or your team or your client that this is desperately needed and that it can really move the needle for the business.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.

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Comments
85

I guess everybody today understands the importance of having a good looking website. It's always about who's the best in the design circle of "the good, the bad & the ugly" looking websites.

I am a web designer and a developer too. It's always up to me to put efforts in the looks, design and feel to websites and equally to my clients. It's necessary to get a unique design idea from both sides. To those who still think their website design sucks should sometimes just consider changing fonts, font colour or sizes, rather perhaps going for a whole design change. Now, ugly websites deserve to be seen and laughed at since it is likely redundant." But the thing that should be learned is "the more design conventions get acknowledged, the better becomes lead capture and conversions".

Would you all mind if I share my website here for a general design feedback.

http://talentsfromindia.com/

Rand-thanks for posting, this was a great help with design point of view !

Hi Sam, I am a web designer and I am studying marketing at university, here is my opinion about your website: It's seems you haven't re design the website since 2009. You should use more images, images are great for marketing (That's why Facebook is becoming more visual with bigger images), people won't read all those paragraphs. Combine a descriptive image with the text you want to share. Also It would be great if you can make your website responsive, as you may know a lot of people are using mobile devices to search the net and we have to give them the best experience we can. And last try working with the design, try to make an attractive design, a design that capture the user attention and their emotional feelings. "Emotional charged events persists much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories." - Designing for emotion by Aarron Walter.

I hope my opinion can help you, check my work at http://www.behance.com/essalvatore and if you need any help I'll be more than happy to help you.

Your baby isn't ugly, but it needs some Ritalin! Your site is way too busy. My first impression is that you are trying to please everyone by putting links for every conceivable thing on the home page. Try cut out about 80% of your links form the home page, and give the page some focus. Try put one message on the page, and only the clicks you want people to click on. Surely your business has some products you'd like to sell more than others, focus on those.

As a web designer, I'm a huge advocate of this. Designers need to work with digital marketers and be consultative to clients, rather than be lead by the client's design taste for a new site. A lot of initial design meetings I go to, the CEO's tend to gravitate towards their competitor's sites and making a mediocre amalgamation of the best bits.

Next time they do that James, remind them that their competitors probably did the same thing when designing their site & given the incredibly low amount of companies that invest in ongoing conversion rate optimization, there's no way for them to know how that site is performing.

This was the case with image sliders, right? Everyone thought they looked great, were super sexy, but when it came time to look at the data, turns out that sliders tank conversions.

Remind the CEO that they are running their own company, and that it's more important they understand their own data & analytics to double down on what's working for them, instead of trying to blindly emulate something that may or may not be working for a competitor. Because in the end, the competition doesn't know what they're doing either.

I as a web designer usually select 30 well made sites from the business field of the client and let then my customer choose their favorites to have a rough design direction and an idea what my customer likes. So I can implement my design taste but let the customer chooses as well (since it is not wise to ignore your customers wishes - at the end he has to like it).

I also want to add that the website does not have to be "ugly" for small improvements to make a huge impact.

At JamesEdition.com I did a enchancement in the design about a year ago, the design still is very similar what it used to be but we made it a little bit wider, making the photos larger, changed the font, etc. It was really not a huge overwhelming redesign of the site, just a few key things to improve (photo-size and width) - but the impact was huge. Time on site up over a minut, bouncerate down to 28% instead of 34%, pages/visit up to 14 instead of 11, etc.

What is interesting here is that it is exactly the same content, the same functions/features, images and so on - but with that "little" change we could increase the activity on the site significantly.

I think there are always room for improvements on any site, it doesnt have to be "ugly" in that sense for a design-change to be extremly effective!

I am all with you. I had a similar effect. I redesigned the website of Manfred Stader (the world's most popular 3D street artist) and once finished he said that he is now overwhelmed with amount of people contacting him and. I guess the design playes a major role.

I appreciate your strategy of creating interest via these excellent examples. You are absolutely right about the thing that we treat our websites like a baby. And we don't want to hear any bad about it.

The links you shared are excellent for getting feedback on work. I am already using Dribbble.com. Other links are new to me but I hope they will help me getting some advice to improve my website.

There is a favourite question on every blog, that looks like "Will the redesign change the stats of my website?". I'm tired to explain, that the main thing that can be changed in that case is usability. There is a big difference between usability and our sympathy to our websites. If we like it, it doesn`t mean that it would work and make money. It can be the most beautiful site in the world, but if it doesn`t make money, so why do we need that?

Its not about redesign of website is about decreasing the loading time of website, by optimizing the landing time of website you can get more value in SERP this was main concern of matt cutts of video :). We all love our creation ( website) but we have update them with time to time :)

Rand Fishkin again i am taking lots of new good things, looking forward to make some optimizing strategies

Design means paying attention to every detail. Fonts, lines, curves, colors, images, everything should be well thought in every page and consistency is of paramount importance. I have seen many wow! websites, but many of them overlook the factor "consistency" and that removes experience points from the user, even subconsciously. This is a low hanging fruit and it should be addressed easily by the designer or the admin.

So Rand, I would also add the factor of "consistency" in your checklist, I think it is important.

Yes, absolutely. I would add as well: Cleanness. Most sites are overloaded with information. Since the hummingbird update it is not needed to put everything on the main site since Google considers the whole web of this company. Better to make nice divisions on the site (e.g different back ground colors, separate important from the unimportant, make nice catchy (design wise) headline, write short sentences, use little pictures and icons). Give out content in slices helps to digest them. Just bit by bit.

Totally agree there are poorly for-conversion optimized websites and the SEO community covers that well, but there are also ugly sites. I think they are two different things. Thanks for bringing this up!

Hey Rand,It's one of the most common problem that majority of us has faced or are facing now. The points that you highlighted are quite helpful but I want to know from the consultant point of view,

If someone approaches you to take over their website and the past experiences were not very much productive for them. A part from their off page SEO, how can you convince them to redesign their site in a first go? Or should we take the project and after gathering the required data we take them on board?

We all know know difficult is to convince the top tier management to redesign the sites completely but I'm sure many people will find this WBF very useful.

By the way, thanks for those 4 tools, gonna try them over the weekend.

Really nice WBF, Rand. I'm concerned about my own site's design. Though simple, I think the design isn't attractive enough. Hence, I've been considering a premium theme from ThemeForest. I'll be curious to see how the new theme impacts user engagement metrics. :)

I just met with a new prospect that is looking to hire me to manage their Internet Marketing and they mentioned redesigning their website. I was happy to hear that but I impressed on them the importance of getting me involved in the project from the start. It's so important for the web designers and developers to be on the same page with the internet marketers. This usually increase the chances for online success greatly! Thanks Rand for this weeks WBF!

Every day I meet business owners fixated on their Google ranking or aiming to simply drive more traffic to their website with little or no consideration for how visitors are interacting with their site. Decisions on design and layout often seem to be signed-off by those with the least ability to make such decisions and with little or no evidence to support their choices.

I have lost count of the number of clients' websites that fail to even communicate what their business does or how it differs from their competitors.

I often wonder whether there are too many web designers aiming to design sites that will look good in their portfolio instead of really thinking through how to make a site usable and appealing to the target demographic of their client's business.

Yes, I agree. And not to forget that a web site is communication. It represents your business. Just think from your perspective when buying software. Would you buy a software from a company that has a beautiful modern design or a company that has a ugly 90s web site.

This is a great forum. I don't really have an eye for design. If anyone on this forum has some time, I would love to get some feedback on the looks of my site. It is quite plain, but I am using a mimimalist concept. I figure it is much easier to add elements and images later than remove them. The website is www.mamenga.com. Thanks everyone.

Thanks Rand. Is our current site that bad? Anyway, our site redesign is about to launch.

The sales guys warned us that our niche B2B network hardware audience can be scare away from the latest web design. They are comfortable with their own 1980s Microsoft modeled sites. Somethign to consider.

That does not mean a good designer can't work with this parameter. I think creating a base to reflect your business positioning, then using A/B testing (w/ Optimizely) to tune up the performance is an effective path to take.

A new addition to the wonderful articles that is absolutely meaningful. Obviously customer is the king and this is the best way to project your website in their terms. An online eCommerce portal is basically an impression of the business that set up the reputation of any online and offline business. Attractive design, easy navigation, products display, secure payment gateways, company information and a lot more sewn together forms a quality website that a customer can trust upon.

Definitely marketing runs parallel to the representation of the business thus contributing to branding somehow.

I remember seen a parallax website that is obviously in demand these days , it has got good graphics but again lack of information that discourage a user to get deeper into. Information along with visuals is a must for any website.

That's so funny, I'm a web designer and i stand behind all the sites that i design and build. We alway get compliments on our site and the least site that I'm proud of is mine lol. I takes so much out of me to rebuild it and I'm never happy with the outcome.

Great whiteboard! Does anyone have any links to websites that publish industry averages as Rand mentioned in his presentation. Would be really helpful to know what Bounce Rate / Page per visits I should be expecting on a curtain website / niche.

Great post! I should agree with you. A good looking website with a lot information that describes the best criteria is more important today. So, all we need to do is to create the website with a lot more patience and a lot more creativity. You explained it with a comprehensive hand. Thanks.

@Rand. Thanks for sharing the sites. Bang on target. Even if you have high quality content but the design is poor in terms of UI, there will be no user retension. A/B testing follows up to find out which combination actually works.

Thanks to Rand Fishkin for sharing this great and inspiring article. Honestly speaking I read this article couple of weeks back when I was designing my own website and decided that after launching my site I would be asking for your opinions on the design. After all there can't be any better place than MOZ to get some inputs on your own works especially when you are an amateur. Yes, I am not a website designer but I always loved beautiful designs whether it is anything online or it is a sculpture, a painting or a picture. I am a professional optimizer and designed my website on my own and now I would like to request you all that if you can just let me know your valuable inputs on the site's design, responsiveness and SEO then that will be a great help for an amateur like me. Brian You are right, "No one wants to hear that their site sucks!" but it is perfectly alright for me if you point out the same which will let me understand where I need to work harder and improve. Thanks & respect to everyone.

The site moderator, KeriMorgret removed the link of my website due to some reason. So if you can check the website link (PromozSEO) in my profile page and let me know your opinions then that will be great.

completely agreed with post. User interface playing a big role in engaging visitors. We have reduced bounce rate of few websites from more than 50% to less than 5%. We have written a case study and submitted to Moz Community and hope it will be published soon. I am very sure it will help the entire community here. By the way take a look at Marketingaxle UI (http://www.marketingaxle.com/), your feedbacks will be welcomed and this one of the website for which we have reduced the bounce rate.

With the "average attention span" of people going down, more and more people want simple, to-the point text and graphics. So it's not all about fonts and pictures. The copy and layout must all be reviewed, and changed if necessary.

It's important to keep older designs saved and design changes recorded, After you make your changes, take a look at the conversion and click through rates of your links. In many cases this should be based on intuition. Does this button seems out of place or confusing? If so, it probably is. By asking for website feedback from friends, colleagues or even your customers you can speed up the process drastically. Unless you're one of us and have no friends (woe me!)

Let me confess by saying that without copywriting or designing experience I managed to whip something up. Our website is called called Helprace, a helpdesk and support software platform. Obviously the goal here is to have a clear, concise site. Since we launched in the Fall of last year, our feedback was quite sporadic so it didn't drive us to make any meaningful changes.

Rand Fishkin, you made this video interesting. I have seen companies which have many conflicts between Marketing and website design/development. Sometimes the web developers are not creative enough to deliver what client needs and sometimes there have been some weird demands from marketing. There are many things which need to be consulted by an online marketer before doing it on a website you can check here on MOZ itself as every web developer does't know about this SEO stuff.

I just want to add something. As of now, yeah having a great web design helps in both SEO and SEM. Let say an e-commerce website that sells fashion products like dresses, cosmetics, etc. and you somehow got a crappy-looking website with dull colors or design. Obviously people specifically ladies (which is more likely your target market) will tend to go back to their searches and look for other websites similar to yours. It will then have an impact to your bounce rate and so on.

Your website represents your brand, your product. If it doesn't look good or looks dull, people will tend to think that your product sucks too which will be bad for your brand. Enhancing user experience in your website greatly helps in overall SEO/SEM through creating gorgeous looking websites.

I think this leaves so much out of why a website is "ugly" or "crap" and what defines what a good website looks like, I think this approach can almost be a trap, and make things worse.

Because, for instance, using competitors in an industry that is brand/visual/experience challenged, does not value what aesthetics mean, how they effect the bottom line, does not value the visual language of the group, and does not understand how these cognitive and other factors shape the experience, you can surround that with all the data you want, and it will not tell you anything or lead you anywhere.

A visually good website with user friendly interface go hand to hand with marketing efforts. But, then we see at Craigslist, eBay and Plenty of Fish and these are making real money. One provides easy way to post ad, other offers almost everything under one roof and one offers what people want. These sites do not have beautiful design but still i think a good design keeps readers on page. Nice Video Rand. Thanks.

This is not only about designers and developers work, Its all about our business website which we all think that our product/website is good because we like it. But, To know the truth and real fact we have need to ask others and to conduct surveys.

This is also a way to ask a business owner to change his website layout. Your reasons can not be enough to convey a business owner to change website design and layout specially if the owner have already a good amount of customers.

Well, I really like your suggested way Rand and I will implement it to approach new clients as well.

Great stuff here... web designers need to work closely with marketers!! I didn't see Nibbler website test that gives an easy to understand report. I like the idea of testing a few pages with a new design before turning over the entire site as long as user DO NOT navigate between the 2 styles.

I have stated this to clients all too often, lol. It's about time someone said it, thanks Rand. We usually include a redesign quote in our initial seo if the site is really bad. People expect to see modern, responsive designs, not some ancient, bad mess from the early 90's.

My company is actually in the middle of cleaning up our entire Web experience (both on the front end for customers and on the back end for crawlers). We currently have four unique domains (plus a blog), all of which have a different style and user path. We're in the process of cleaning all of them up and giving them a more cohesive UX.

One thing that has come up numerous times is the balance between designing a site that looks fresh/modern while avoiding blindly giving in to the trend of the moment. Too many people will see a new trend and go all-in with it, only to find 8 months later that their site already looks stale and commonplace. Just make sure to keep your specific audience in mind (and take their feedback seriously) while allowing some of the new trends to guide your initial design process. This should result in a sleek, user-driven site that is specialized enough to give it a decent shelf life.

Finally, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, don't forget your mobile site! You can spoil your oldest child with all of the shiny toys you want, but if you're not giving your mobile baby equal love and affection you're going to have a bad time.

Right, but anyone with a responsive site has at least already given their mobile site the necessary love. Sadly, there are still a lot of small/medium businesses out there haven't gotten to that point yet.

As a web developer and SEO, this is a nightmare scenario - a new customer comes along who wants you to market their website and work wonders for their online business ... but your starting point is a poorly made website in terms of aesthetics and usability.

Personally I always aim to be honest and upfront and adopt one of two approaches:

1. Kindly point out upfront to the client that without a well built website, your good efforts will be in vein.2. Or, if you don't yet have a relationship of confidence and trust with the company, first do an excellent job promoting their business, whilst gathering evidence and feedback from clients and website users that clearly demonstrate that the marketing cycle / sales funnel is breaking down due to a poorly made website. Once you have built up the trust of your client, you are in a stronger position to suggest website changes and have the influence within the company to get the changes implemented.

I would also add, to Rand's list of useful resources criticue.com and Nibbler - here you can get unbiased feedback on your website from fellow web designers.

Lipstick on a pig - I call it spit shining a turd. I can't tell you how crazy it makes me when someone wants results yet they love their ugly website. Hard to convince an emotional attachment. I usually let time pass and let them fail. When less revenue is coming in that breaks the emotional attachment. I tell then, now let me try.

As a digital marketing company we see alot of clients that come to us with already existing websites which are on the "other side" of the graph that you displayed and emphasizing on marketing the same thing. The first and foremost thing that we do is spend some time on the client and give him some figurative or visual clues as to what needs to be changed in their website that would push the marketing efforts. Getting it fixed by us or by someone else is the choice of the client ofcourse, but that does help build trusted relationships with customers and get repeat clients.

The list of websites that you have mentioned for the UX testing is sure a good list, worked on some of them my self.

There are also some very cheep services like $5 per hour for UX testing available from freelancers, however I generally do not trust those for a very insightful solution, but yes, sometimes it does help. Some of the other sites that could be checked out are:

It happens when client think that you are just trying to make "extra" money from him. In such cases consulting other company for their views helps a lot. Or, you can partner a consultant and refer things to him and ask to give fair opinion. Networking this way helps a lot and flourish business.

RE-DESIGN should be a standard part of any SEO-Offer. The most SEOs should work with an external designer for this part since many SEOs are more like technicians and not artists. And for the design part an eye for aesthetics is needed.

Great article!! My company offers a free service to combat this obstacle. Our free website audit is a human analysis of your content, SEO, keywords, design, compatibility, site speed, etc. We've had a LOT of success through this service and have gathered dozens of clients simply through telling them what they should fix... for free. A beautiful design can make up for a lot of other shortcomings.

I've potentially got a site to bring from the 1990's into the 2010's. Haven't yet spoken to the owner about the site design, but it does not make the business appear professional or credible. Without evoking that trust from consumers, all else is pretty much lost in that company's online marketing efforts.

This'll be some great advice to try out though and see if I can provide some more solid data on why they should update their site design.

I've lost several deals telling business owners they needed to redesign their website. I've learned that it takes tact and common sense to be successful at suggesting that a website be redesigned. Rand you definitely gave some great ways to present data to do the convincing. No one wants to hear that their site sucks! Me included. :P

Thanks for sharing this very useful tip Rand! I agree with you. It's very important to ask your customers about how they view your website before you decide to redesign it. Another important thing is to ask for advise from your friends and designers who have the knowledge in designing a business website.

We were discussing putting lipstick on a pig the other day. It's almost like you have a microphone in our office, Rand...

Just had a site design come back from approval with changes that are horrendous. Client ownership loves it... I'm under the impression their conversions will suffer greatly for it. Unfortunately, we can't talk them out of it. Hopefully this pig will wear the lipstick well.

Great WBF. I couldn't agree more. Sometimes it is difficult to convince new clients that they would benefit from an overhaul of their existing website. I often tell people that the idea of marketing and SEO is to bring potential clients to their website but I am hesitant to do so if the website itself will turn off visitors. An aesthetically pleasing, fully functioning website needs to be a solid foundation for any marketing efforts put forth.

We recently started doing a "Website Redesign Makeover Monday" (inspired in-part by Whiteboard Friday) to show businesses the potential in redesigning their site.

Just to clarify, we are able to tell if a website is ugly depending on what the industry experts, potential consumers, and current consumers say correct? I got a little bit lost around that point when I was watching the video.

I agree 100% with Rand that measuring a site's Top of Funnel Metrics is a KPI.

I took 10 Top Social Media Marketing sites and compared their TOF Metrics using Alexa vs. SimilarWeb and created a SlideShare Deck comparing (total visitors, page views, time on site, bounce rate and USA rank) http://hovr.us/QVynr

I was surprised to see some of the "mega" sites (1 Million+ visitors) had huge bounce rates, small # of page view counts and time on site (browse rate) under 2 minutes.

I've been told its possible to "game" Alexa and I've only recently started using SimilarWeb stats, but for a quick overview, both of these aggregator stats seem to be in step with each other.

Having ugly website is just like wearing a dirty cloths, both will receive the similar response from the audience. Website is the virtual personality of the business and it dose make the impression of the visitors. So, I guess having the best website is the first & foremost responsibility of any business. IBM, GE, Nike, Xerox, Coke, Tata Business Support Services, SAP are some of the best websites I have come across.